Ninety years ago, the trams stopped in Dublin and opened the longestindustrial dispute in Irish history, writes Pádraig Yeates.
When conductors and drivers stepped down from their "stately ships of the suburbs" at 9.40 a.m. on August 26th, 1913, and donned the Red Hand badge of the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union, they little dreamt they were initiating the nearest thing this country has ever seen to a socialist revolution. They were simply looking for union recognition, and the chairman of the Dublin United Tramways Company (DUTC), William Martin Murphy, had always insisted that he supported unions, provided they were "respectable" and "responsible". Unfortunately, Jim Larkin's ITGWU was neither.
In fact, the ITGWU was more akin to a revolutionary movement spreading Larkin's "divine mission of discontent". It preached the gospel that an injury to one was the concern of all and used the "sympathetic strike" tactic to enforce it.
In the first half of 1913 the sympathetic strike - where workers refused to handle the goods of any company that refused to recognise the union or negotiate with it - proved a remarkably effective weapon. The ITGWU secured increases of between 20 and 25 per cent for workers - many of them women - across the city, as well as farm labourers in the county.
The lord mayor proposed a conciliation board to curb the strife, and, only a couple of weeks before the tramway strike, the city's employers and the Dublin Trades Council agreed to nominate members to the new body. Murphy, who had been ill at the time of the lord mayor's initiative, was extremely unhappy about it. When Larkin began organising in the DUTC, Murphy decided he had to beat him at his own game and counter the sympathetic strike of the workers with the sympathetic lockout by the bosses.
The dramatic opening of the dispute in the week of the Royal Dublin Horse Show has long been celebrated as a demonstration of trade-union strength. In fact, it was a sign of weakness.
Larkin had wanted to mount pickets on the DUTC depots that morning to stop the trams from leaving. But Murphy had been busy purging the DUTC of union activists, and the ITGWU leader knew he must act while he had members left. The only way to immobilise the service was for trams to be abandoned at key junctions such as O'Connell Street. Fewer than 200 men out of 800 answered the strike call. Murphy had emergency replacements operating abandoned vehicles in less than an hour.
At that point the strike should have fizzled out, but Murphy was determined to smash the ITGWU and its Liverpool-Irish leader. Murphy, an important figure in conservative nationalist circles, saw the ITGWU not just as a trade union whose demands drove up wage costs, but as a vehicle for anglicising, secularising and socialising Ireland. The proof was to be had in the soaring sales of British tabloids, which gave the workers' cause far more sympathetic coverage than Murphy's own Irish Independent and Evening Herald.
The type of worker Larkin represented had no rights in Murphy's eyes. The Irish Catholic, another Murphy-owned publication, referred to them as "all the foul reserves of the slums, human beings whom life in the most darksome depths of a great city has deprived of most of the characteristics of civilisation".
Most of the city's employers agreed. Murphy had little difficulty persuading them to lock out workers who refused to sign a pledge renouncing the ITGWU. Within a month most of the city's unionised workers were locked out, and a third of the population was on the breadline. Over the next five months, thousands of people were evicted from their homes or had them wrecked by the police, hundreds had been injured and an indeterminate number killed.
The dead included: John McDonagh, an unemployed worker batoned by police while he lay paralysed in his bed; Thomas Harten, a farm labourer from Meath kicked to death outside Liberty Hall for strike-breaking; and James Byrne, the ITGWU branch secretary in Dún Laoghaire, who went on a hunger and thirst strike in Mountjoy after being falsely charged with intimidation.
The arid political dialogue of competing nationalisms over Home Rule and Partition was replaced briefly by debates on such unlikely and distinctly un-Irish subjects as female suffrage, the evils of international capitalism and the merits of socialism, trade unionism and slum-clearance.
It was even suggested that parents should decide how their children should be educated - and that children might have rights of their own!
It took five months for the combined power of Irish constitutional nationalists, employers, the main churches and the British government to push the genie back into the bottle. Meanwhile, the death rate in Dublin rose that winter to 25.9 per thousand, compared to 14.8 in London. Infant mortality, already the highest in Europe, rose by 100 per cent as the effects of the lockout took hold.
The only significant help came from British workers, with the Trades Union Congress alone raising almost £100,000 to feed the strikers. Respectable Dubliners contributed a mere £2,050 to the Lady Mayoress's Distress Fund over the same period - a fund that excluded strikers and their families from assistance. To put that figure in context, over £1,300 was raised in November, when the strike was at its peak, for the China missions so that nuns in Peking could buy "Buddhist infants at five pence ha'penny a head" for conversion.
In contrast, strikers' wives attempting to send their children to sympathisers in England for the duration of the lockout were denounced by the Catholic Church as unfit to be called mothers and had their names and addresses published in Murphy's newspapers. It gave Dublin's 90,000 Protestants an inkling that, despite protestations to the contrary from nationalist leaders, Home Rule might not be that different from Rome Rule.
Meanwhile, British employers provided secret subsidies of over £9,000 to keep Dublin businesses solvent. Lord Iveagh contributed £5,000 more.
Dublin Castle did its bit, providing 20,000 police escorts to bring goods through picket lines, and military patrols to protect "scabs" on hulks in the Alexandra Basin. However, the Admiralty turned down a request from employers to station warships in the Liffey!
Somehow, the ITGWU survived the storm. Members crept back to work on any terms they could obtain. Many others emigrated or joined the British army.
The first World War was about to make Ireland safe again for the conservative status quo of nationalist versus unionist, Catholic versus Protestant. The labour shortages bred by war made Ireland a kinder place for trade unions and, thanks to 1913, the movement now marched out of the small craft-based ghettoes into which Murphy wanted to confine it, and into the mainstream of Irish life.
The key lesson that trade unionists took from the events of 1913 was the need to broaden their agenda from workplace issues to wider political, social and economic issues. The emergence of social partnership can be seen equally legitimately as part of that legacy or its betrayal. Perhaps a more important question for today's trade union movement is whether its members have the same vision as their forefathers, and mothers, or are they content to become a bastion of a relatively secure and well-paid minority of the workforce?
Pádraig Yeates is a former Irish Times journalist and author of Lockout: Dublin 1913